Category Archives: Family

Changing of the Seasons

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The leaves begin to thin imperceptibly at the start of October, the pace quickening as the month passes, until one powerful storm, often the first week or two of November, scatters all to the ground. In their leaving, stark shapes out of myth and folklore will walk the forest, stand as watchful sentinels in the middle of a pasture. It is a beautiful transformation.

While each month is an ending, in fall and winter it is felt most keenly. Spring and summer, by contrast, are seasons of abundance, filled with work that is characterized by restraining the energies of nature, channeling it for productive needs that we desire. They are a time of growth, wild and teenaged, that without pruning (and sometimes with) overwhelms. Days are filled with hours of mowing and harvesting, sowing and planting. Sunlight lingers deep into the evening, long after the will to do more has flagged.

Then the seasons turn. Starting with the falling of the leaves, the farm shifts to maintaining and maintenance. There is new life, still — garlic and onions planted in October, lambing midwinter, greens in the hoop house, potatoes sown in February. But the time has come for clearing fence rows, cutting back old-growth vines and spent plants, repairing hay barns and other outbuildings.

Now begins the practical time of the year, less driven by the need to simply keep up and more molded by catching up. Which is perhaps why farmers traditionally speak of fall and winter as slower. The workload doesn’t lessen, but the character of the labor changes fundamentally. It is more structural, both literally and figuratively; with hands to the saw and mind released from the routine and endless sunlight, one can focus more on the process and life.

That my father passed away three weeks ago, and my stepmother joined him last night, finds me a bit more introspective than usual this season. Farming has shifted my appreciation and understanding of the cycles of life; it also, hopefully, has made me more accepting of certain inevitable changes that life brings to us all. It has, and I hope this is understood, made me appreciate more deeply the devoted care that my sisters Kathryn and Laura gave to both parents over the past eight years. To my way of thinking, they husbanded well their charges, with attention and love, then let them go graciously when the time arrived.

That both parents departed as summer ended and fall began is a gift to use. One that can shape the work to come: help me mend what I have and prepare for the new life that while already growing dormant is also readying for rebirth.

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Reading this weekend: The Shepherd’s Calendar (J. Clare), which might simply be the most beautiful poem by one who knew. And for the second time, The Lord of the Rings (J. R. R. Tolkien), because I am in need of a journey and a heroic saga.

Sounds of My Father

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William H. Miller, aged 94, passed away yesterday evening at his home in the company of two of his daughters. For the past two weeks, as he said goodbye to this life, he had a steady stream of family to keep him company. When I left him on Thursday, of last week, he wished me safe travels. That was my father to the end, uncomplaining and concerned about others.

Dad holding his youngest grandson. The big lad on the right, next to me, is his oldest grandson (with his son in front).

It takes a lifetime to understand and appreciate one’s father, a journey that is far from complete. But for now, this morning, I’ll leave it at these three remembrances.

 

The first:

The wind was out of the northwest, the temperature hovering in the low forties, as I hoed the potato beds for a spring planting. A weak March sun broke through often enough to bring out the ruddy freckles of my hands, hands that were the mirror image of my father’s.

At the end of the row, I stopped and put the hoe away and went inside to begin packing to head home to Louisiana to visit my dad in the hospital. My father is just shy of his 89th birthday and has always enjoyed good health, but he had had a stroke and was now recovering in a rehabilitation unit. With good care and the attention of my sisters, he was in good spirits and improving ahead of expectations.

A couple of days later I was at the hospital, helping him tear open a packet of crackers as we caught up on his progress. Earlier that morning, while he was busy with rehab, I had gone to the parish documents office to get a copy of my birth certificate.

Staring down at the record before me, I was struck by the inheritance that came with being the son of William H. Miller of Lake Charles, Louisiana: Fifty-three years earlier, I had been born in the same hospital where my father now recovered. It was the same hospital where all eight of his children were born. The same hospital where my mother and older sister had died, and a younger brother had passed away a few days after his birth. The same hospital where my dad recalled carrying me as he walked up and down the hallway when I was sick as a child.

My cousin from Texas showed up for a visit just as my dad was eating lunch, part of a steady stream of well-wishers who stopped by throughout the noon hour and into the early afternoon — an appropriate testament to a man who for nearly eight decades has been an active part of a community, a man who has lent his hands, as it were, over the years to whatever has been needed. 

That involvement in the community was a lifelong occupation of my father’s generation. Countless hours each week, often on the heels of working all day, were spent in service. Years ago, as a child, I found a handwritten list from my dad’s boyhood, a list of items he deemed essential to a good life. Top of the list was to do a good deed each day without the person on the receiving end being aware of it. No chest-thumping, no look-at-me, just a hidden hand helping others up.

As I prepared to say goodbye and return to Tennessee, I recalled an evening when my older brother and I had sat around the kitchen table with other family members. We both had our hands resting on the table’s surface in front of us. My niece, my brother’s daughter, looked across the table and said in surprise, “You both have the same hands!” I laughed and pointed at our father, who was sitting in a similar pose: “Well, there is the template for those hands.”

It was those hands I shook as I said goodbye, aware that my inheritance is both a privilege and a responsibility.

 

The second:

It is dawn out on the Gulf of Mexico, 1974. The throttle is hard down on the 22-foot open Wellcraft as the first waves check our smooth progress, sharply marking the passage from inside South Louisiana’s protective Mermentau River jetties to open water. With an hour till full sunrise, the air is still cool and we have 10 miles to go before the inner line of oil rigs. I eat a mustard and liverwurst sandwich, sitting on the bow, legs dangling over the side, as we begin to plane out over the crest of the waves.

The fog is lifting when we pass the first rigs, and we both see and hear them, each with its own distinctive horn. The skies are clear, the winds calm, so we head farther into to gulf to the rigs 20 miles offshore in search of red snapper.

Once we’re beyond the first belt of rigs, we drop the trolling lines, looking to get some king mackerel. We find instead that the Spanish mackerel have started their runs in the northern gulf. We quickly begin to get some strikes. Before long we have a dozen seven-pounders in the ice chests, thumping around in the well running down the center of the boat.

By 10 a.m. we are pulling up to the next grouping of rigs. Dad slows the boat and circles the platform so we can tie up and fish. Standing on the bow with the rig hook, a 10-foot-long aluminum shaft with an over-large shepherd’s crook on one end, I wait. The rig hook has a rope attached with a rubber tensioner tied in the middle, and each oil rig is composed of two-foot-diameter pipes. My job is to reach out and hook the rig, then secure the rope.

Modest three-to-four-foot swells are coming in under the bow, and with the boat nosed under the platform, the up and down motion is significant. Balancing, waiting for the boat to rise, I reach out and make the hook. Dad throttles back to about 30 feet from the rig, and I tie us off. My brother Keith and I break out the tackle, bait our hooks with pogies, and drop our lines. The depth at 20 miles off the Cameron Parish coastline is only 20-30 feet.

We stay put for a couple of hours, adding more sheepshead than red snapper to the cooler. The waves start to shift direction, so we move on. We troll for another hour without much success. Keith gets one sensational strike from what is probably a ling, but the large fish throws the lure in an acrobatic leap out of the water.

Thunderstorms are beginning to build to the east and west, so Dad turns our boat northward and begins a fast run to the jetties. Other than a few waterspouts at 10 miles distance, the return trip is uneventful. The water is smooth on the Mermentau, and we head the final four miles to the dock at Grand Chenier. With our boat safely trailered, we stop by the Tarpon Freezo for a malt in the one-blinking-light town of Creole. We’re delayed at the drawbridge by heavy barge traffic on the intercoastal, but we’re finally back home around 5.

Having cleaned the boat and hosed the salt from the tackle, the three of us stand in the backyard cleaning and gutting for the next couple of hours. I dump the heads and guts to the waiting turtles in our five-acre pond. The fish are packed in Guth milk cartons and stacked in the freezer. Exhausted but satisfied, we polish our shoes for church in the morning and call it a day.

 

The third:

It always seemed cold out on the Louisiana marsh as a boy. On Thanksgiving eve my father and I would head out to the hunting camp, a ramshackle building under centuries-old live oaks. At dinner we’d sit down at a long communal table and enjoy hearty bowls of duck gumbo. The dozen or more men would talk, and we the sons would keep quiet, seen but not heard. The morning smell of bacon and eggs served as an early alarm. And by 4:30 we were climbing into mud-boats and heading off across the marsh. At regular intervals a father and son would disembark into a wooden pirogue and push off into the darkness, usually arriving at a duck blind an hour before sunrise. Our hunt would begin with my father calling the ducks, enticing them to circle and land.

At the end of the hunt in late morning, we’d head home, pulling into the drive around noon. Thanksgiving preparations inside were well underway, pies lined up on the counter. I’d cast an anxious gaze to determine that a favored sweet potato pie was among them, then off for a shower and a change to clean clothes. The table was set and dinner typically eaten in mid-afternoon; afterward, the calls would begin from distant relatives.

Today, as a grown man, my rituals have changed. I’m now the relative calling across the distance of a time zone and seven hundred miles. Instead of a duck hunt early Thanksgiving, my morning is filled with chores: feeding pigs, sheep, cattle and chickens, stacking wood for the woodstove. Busy, but still time will be made later for a woodland walk on our farm. We eat late, so no need to rush dinner preparations. Some years we are graced by the company of friends, and other years we dine alone. This year, Cindy travels and I will dine by myself or with a couple of friends.

I’ll prepare a roast duck in memory of those boyhood hunts with my father. And I’ll regret the absence from the table of a sweet potato pie. But since it is Thanksgiving, I’ll be grateful for reasonable health, a loving partner, a satisfying life, a full library; that my father is still with us, as is a large abundance of siblings and other kin. I’ll also be thankful for what is absent in my life, namely, the darkness of war and the dislocation from hearth and home of the refugee.

As I step out on the porch before sunrise Thanksgiving morning, the air will smell of smoke from a dozen farmhouses in our valley. It will be cold on our farm here in the hills of East Tennessee. The cattle will begin to bawl. But over their din, if I listen well, I will hear the sound of my father calling the wild ducks out on the marsh.

 

Notes From My Other Home

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Good morning,

I am off the farm and spending time with family in Louisiana where my father is observing his 94th birthday. He still has a handshake that will make you wince and his appetite for boiled crawfish, I am happy to report, is undiminished. Sitting around with family and eating the good food of this region has left me both stuffed and content. Or, as my maternal grandmother taught me to say, I have had a sufficiency. Here is a post from the archives about both the sufficient and the gourmandizing tendencies of this son of this soil.

My father, nephew Cody with his son Eli.

Blog note: I’ll catch up on my country wine posts next weekend.   

What We Share

Sitting down with kith and kin at my dad’s 91st birthday, I was reminded that we learn to eat as children. The table last Saturday was weighed down with more than 150 pounds of crawfish and accompanying bags of spicy boiled corn and potatoes. Homemade jambalaya my sister Laura made. And, for the vegan niece, some sort of weird processed “hotdog.” We variously stood and sat as we talked and listened. Food, family, friends, and lots of conversation.

The role food played last week was the same role it played in my childhood, and still does in my adulthood, that of bringing people together. From the crawfish and crab boils to grand Sunday dinners and church picnics; from duck and chicken-and-sausage gumbos to BBQ and fried catfish, links of boudin, and platters of dirty rice; from running trotlines, fishing 30 miles out in the gulf, and hauling up shrimp nets or oyster tongs to shooting ducks and geese and harvesting deer, the end goal was always the same: food that you could share.

TV and computers were not part of our world. No screen time, head down, eyes staring. You left the table only after you asked to be excused and were given permission. Weeknights were family dinners and catching up. Weekends and holidays were gatherings of the larger group of friends and family. And always set to the backdrop of food, meat, seafood, game, vegetables, and the ubiquitous dish of rice.

Sunday was the time for the big dinner of the week. It was frequently an occasion for serving up some fish or seafood we had caught — red snapper in butter and lemon, mackerel balls fried with a cornmeal dusting, platters of oysters, mounds of fried catfish, all accompanied by coils of the spicy local sausages, warmed on the grill. The family would often be joined by guests, perhaps a couple of youth from Boys Town or a new minister and his family.

During one such dinner, with a new pastor from Oklahoma, we received a call from an elderly neighbor. Upon coming downstairs that fine spring morning, she found an alligator in her parlor. It had strolled in through an open door and made itself at home. Dad used a ski rope to make a noose, slipped it over the beast’s head, and dragged it back out to the bayou, no doubt confirming in the new minister’s mind his worst fears about where he had relocated his family.

That is me (on the right) with my youngest nephew, Finn. We just finished having breakfast at K.D.’s

Some Sundays after service we headed to the Piccadilly. Dining at the small-town Southern restaurant was reminiscent of the Lyle Lovett song, “Church.” If your preacher became a bit long-winded, you might just find yourself waiting in line behind the First Baptists, or, God forbid, the Methodists.

From a kid’s perspective, Fridays were hopeful evenings. My parents were active in a supper club and a bridge club. Supper club in the house meant hovering near the kitchen to snag plates of oysters Rockefeller fresh from the oven, bridge club loading up on shrimp broiled in butter and spices.

Annually, there were the church picnics, feasts of such epic proportions they required each of us to be heroes of the plate and fork. Whole tables were devoted to fried chicken and banana puddings, the memory of which would still be a siren’s call onto the rocks of gluttony, except for the fact that underpinning all the food was the fellowship of friends and family.

A bowl of goodness at a roadside diner in Mermantau.

So today, on our farm, with freezers full and gardens gathering steam, we ask the weekly question, What do we have to share and who can we invite to join in the bounty — neighbors in the valley, friends from town or city, longer-distance guests?

Last night six friends helped us devour bowls of creamy grits topped with cooked-down collard greens and fried slices from a terrine of braised pork. We dined outside, sitting late into the evening as the full moon rose high in the sky. Good friends, conversation, and a bottle of elderberry mead helped us keep the faith with who we are as a people and the traditions we carry forward from childhood.

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Reading this weekend: Essays from The Gift of Good Land (W. Berry)

 

A Good Woman

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July, 1920

In 1920, in July of that year, if you had stood in my grandfather’s rice fields in South Louisiana and chanced to gaze overhead at the blue summer skies, they would have been clear of contrails. This was only the dawning of the aviation age. Jet travel was another generation, and a world war, into the future. The Spanish flu pandemic was only a year past. In downtown Crowley the livery stables did a strong business renting horses and buggies. Elderly Confederate soldiers were still a part of everyday family life, and former slaves still walked about and indeed worked in the homes of that small city. This was the world Marjorie Jo Yeomans was born into, the eldest of three daughters, the youngest of whom was my mother.

When someone lives more than a hundred years, it nonetheless can come as a shock, as it did for me, to receive the call of her passing. Aunt Jo was the memory keeper for our family, the one who knew the scallywags in our closet and their stories. Her historical memory among family members was legend. Her own past as a member of the editorial staff of The Papers of Andrew Johnson; as a wife, mother, and grandmother; a teacher of history; a lifelong member of both the UDC and DAR as well as a committed believer in the social gospel — all prepared her for a life that served as an active witness to a century she both bridged and transcended. (She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history and was proud of the fact that she was the first woman at her undergraduate college to receive history honors.)

My aunt taught me several important life lessons. Not object lessons but ones taught by example, with humor and a keen intelligence. The most important is that life is not black or white; it is instead shaded in gray. Which means that those we love or admire, past or present, have feet of clay. To expect otherwise is a delusion and a snare. Accepting that truth brings peace.

I began this remembrance hoping to share more of my aunt’s life history: she was a woman both ordinary and remarkable. Yet that is not what matters here; you really do not need to know those details. What matters is that you make the effort to know and care for the people in your life, to discover the shared threads of family and culture, to appreciate the fullness of the story you are a part of each day. Not to be surprised by the fault lines in a life, but to embrace the full artistry of that imperfect creation.

Having said that, I will leave you with this one memory: In the spring of 2010, I drove Aunt Jo to a veteran’s center in a last effort by her to get my uncle quality care at an affordable rate. After being told the facility was full, we sat with the director in a neat and sterile office and tried to find out what if anything we could do. My aunt laid out before the director my uncle’s discharge records from the bomber crew he served on while stationed in England during World War II. Page after page carefully preserved a view of his life from that world now vanished. When finally it became clear that there was no help to be had for my uncle, we stood to leave. My aunt turned to the director one last time and said, “But he is such a good man.”

July, 2020

When Marjorie Jo Yeomans turned 100 this past July under blue Tennessee skies, contrails were once again absent and another pandemic was once again loose on the land. A small group of family, restricted in number and contact, joined her in celebrating her birthday. My aunt lived another six months, until this past Monday, when she died in her sleep. As I reflect on her life, I think back to her words about her husband, and I can also say with confidence that she, my mother’s sister, was a good woman. And she was loved. That is more than enough.

Falling Letters

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There are days when the feeling of being a relic of another age haunts my every step. Such as last night, while looking for a recipe for fried catfish, when I found a letter, tucked into the pages of a cookbook, from an old friend. Instead of preparing dinner, I caught up with the 2011 version of my friend in her small village in Norfolk, England.

I could have just as easily grabbed my copy of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and read the tucked-away letter from my friend Phil (who lives in London) from 1996, in which he provided a translation of slang to help me understand the novel. Or the long letter from Uncle Al, now deceased, from January 1981, following my visit from Lake Charles to see him and his wife, my aunt, in Knoxville over Christmas 1980. Among the hundreds of books in my library reside dozens that hold the ephemera of my life.

This habit of longstanding, the placing of letters and postcards received into books selected at random, rewards me in ways that are increasingly hard to convey. It provides me with renewed emotional connections to people I know and love. This habit, shared by many, is the reason that out-of-print bookstore owners carefully leaf through the pages of books as they purchase: to find those records of life (and the occasional currency) that, in the sellers’ case, add value to the book.

It is also one of the reasons booksellers prefer the well-worn book to the newly printed title. Those old books are sanctified, bathed in the blood of time, and they share a permanent kinship with the former owner. Out of a biography of William Morris I once purchased fell an invoice dated July 23, 1926, from Mayhew Second-hand Booksellers on Charing Cross Road, London. That I had an invoice from that road, so well known among bibliophiles (84 Charing Cross Road), to a woman living in Knoxville, Tennessee, was a miraculous connection. I would like to have known her and why she ordered that title from that shop.

There is a cultural value to ephemera, whether it’s a postcard addressed to me or an invoice tucked away in a book or a bundle of letters nestled in a drawer. It connects us all. If not for the practitioners of writing letters and saving letters, I would not now have the correspondence of my father to his mother, written while he was stationed in the Pacific during World War 2. Or the letter of a great-great aunt to my great-grandmother complaining of getting fat from drinking beer in her old age (found in a book of my grandmother). By losing the ephemera, we lose the moments of serendipity that go with it.

The overall decline in literacy — the familiar drum I pound too often — will, no doubt, have its detrimental effect. But so too will the overall loss of curiosity about our past that this minor act of historical mining encourages. Why would we be interested in the letters of an aunt or uncle, found in a book, if we don’t read books in the first place? Write a letter when we care only about digital bytes of information, or simply reject the past in all of its parts in favor of the self-chosen family of the present? For the uninquisitive, the aliterate, the presentist, the past is opaque, perhaps never even occurred. The life of the email, the text, the tweet, the Instagram picture, all are ephemeral, each instantly deletable.

While this digital infatuation may be the enemy of future scholars, it is our collective loss as well. So, I leave you with this wish, that this Christmas season you experience the genuine pleasure of opening a book and having a letter fall into your lap, leaving you to spend a few minutes or an evening recalling a friend, a loved one, even a stranger, and for a moment in time step out of the present.

Thanks to my friend Richenda and her rediscovered letter for prompting these thoughts.